Archive for the ‘flames’ Category

I am a climate lukewarmer. That means I think recent global warming is real, mostly man-made and will continue but I no longer think it is likely to be dangerous and I think its slow and erratic progress so far is what we should expect in the future. That last year was the warmest yet, in some data sets, but only by a smidgen more than 2005, is precisely in line with such lukewarm thinking.

This view annoys some sceptics who think all climate change is natural or imaginary, but it is even more infuriating to most publicly funded scientists and politicians, who insist climate change is a big risk. My middle-of-the-road position is considered not just wrong, but disgraceful, shameful, verging on scandalous. I am subjected to torrents of online abuse for holding it, very little of it from sceptics.

I was even kept off the shortlist for a part-time, unpaid public-sector appointment in a field unrelated to climate because of having this view, or so the headhunter thought. In the climate debate, paying obeisance to climate scaremongering is about as mandatory for a public appointment, or public funding, as being a Protestant was in 18th-century England.

MANY of the world’s leaders in science, engineering and other relevant disciplines will no longer comment publicly about climate change. They fear being labelled scaremongers, or deniers, or funded by special interest groups, or not caring about the poor.

This must change this year or what promises to be the largest global warming agreement in history will be signed at the United Nations climate conference in December with little or no input from many of the brightest minds in the field.

Taming the noxious and illogical climate change debate will not be easy. We will need strong public leadership from philosophers and other scholars who study rational argumentation to help us overcome the errors in thinking that are sabotaging the discussion. At stake are billions of dollars, countless jobs and, if activists are right, the fate of the global environment itself. Intellectuals have a moral duty to tackle this problem.

But perhaps not a lot of people know that the picture for our woodland wildlife isn’t looking very rosy. Birds like the willow tit, a woodland specialist, have declined by over 80%, making it our fastest declining resident bird. The State of Nature report showed that of the 1256 woodland species we have data for, 60% have declined over the past 50 years, 35% strongly. Some of our woodland birds migrate, so the problems might lie elsewhere, but equally we know that some of the causes of these declines are right here, in UK woodlands.

LUNACY! The Lib Dem energy minister switched our biggest power station from coal to wood brought by diesel-guzzling ships from the U.S. The result? It costs us all a fortune and emits MORE pollution.

Indeed, it was Mr Davey who opened a new biomass phase for the vast Drax coal-fired power station near Selby in North Yorkshire last year, heralding the move as a new chapter in a low-carbon future.

This is a real landmark for Drax and for Britain’s energy security,’ he said. ‘Drax’s ambitious plans have made it one of Europe’s biggest renewable generators, helping to increase our green energy supplies.

Except there’s just one problem. Drax’s conversion to run half of its output on biomass means it will have to rely on wood from trees cut down in forests in America. The Sixties power station’s giant furnaces are being loaded with wood pellets carried 3,800 miles across the Atlantic in diesel-guzzling ships.

This grotesque environmental charade is being funded by government subsidies for the conversion of its coal-burning furnaces to biomass ones, which will put an estimated £23 on every family’s annual household energy bills for the next 13 years.(more…)

Every year a number of new words are added to the English Dictionary. As renewable energy spreads across the world, they will add their own unique terminology. Wind turbines are well known for chomping their way through thousands of birds and bats each year. While photovoltaics are relatively benign, while they are intact, solar plants that use hundreds of mirrors to focus the Sun’s energy, are far from environmentally friendly. Now they have supplied their own unique and grim word.

“Streamer” a bird that burns as it flys through the concentrated solar rays generated by a solar plant’s mirrors.

Matt Ridley article for the Times, reposted from the GWPF, because as many people as possible need to read it and think. Then act by using your vote sensibly.

ANOTHER RENEWABLE MYTH GOES UP IN SMOKE
Date: 28/07/14 Matt Ridley, The Times

If wood-burning power stations are less eco-friendly than coal, we are getting the search for clean energy all wrong
On Saturday my train was diverted by engineering works near Doncaster. We trundled past some shiny new freight wagons decorated with a slogan: “Drax — powering tomorrow: carrying sustainable biomass for cost-effective renewable power”. Serendipitously, I was at that moment reading a report by the chief scientist at the Department of Energy and Climate Change on the burning of wood in Yorkshire power stations such as Drax. And I was feeling vindicated.

A year ago I wrote in these pages that it made no sense for the consumer to subsidise the burning of American wood in place of coal, since wood produces more carbon dioxide for each kilowatt-hour of electricity. The forests being harvested would take four to ten decades to regrow, and this is the precise period over which we are supposed to expect dangerous global warming to emerge. It makes no sense to steal beetles’ lunch, transport it halfway round the world, burning diesel as you do so, and charge hard-pressed consumers double the price for the power it generates.

Oh dear. Roger Harrabin, the well known BBC climate mouthpiece, has been unable to take a home truth on the chin. I got into a short twitter row about the EPA’s ‘pollution’ controls with him and the outcome is below the break.(more…)

Up to 120 wind turbines catch fire annually, according to the journal of Fire Safety Science. This is 10 times the number reported by the industry, The figures, compiled by engineers at Imperial College London and the University of Edinburgh, make fire the second-largest cause of accidents after blade failure.

The researchers claim that out of 200,000 turbines around the world, 117 fires take place annually, many more than the 12 reported by wind farm companies.

I had a brief chat with a journalist friend yesterday whose sister is a QC. He’s going to sound her out for me about the possibility of a class action against the BBC for breaking its charter. This from the Telegraph:

BBC journalists are being sent on courses to stop them inviting so many cranks onto programmes to air ‘marginal views’

The BBC Trust on Thursday published a progress report into the corporation’s science coverage which was criticised in 2012 for giving too much air-time to critics who oppose non-contentious issues.

The report found that there was still an ‘over-rigid application of editorial guidelines on impartiality’ which sought to give the ‘other side’ of the argument, even if that viewpoint was widely dismissed.

Some 200 staff have already attended seminars and workshops and more will be invited on courses in the coming months to stop them giving ‘undue attention to marginal opinion.’

“The Trust wishes to emphasise the importance of attempting to establish where the weight of scientific agreement may be found and make that clear to audiences,” wrote the report authors.

A few years ago, I started a wikipedia page on the Gore Effect; the uncanny phenomenon which unleashes snow, hail, torrential rain, icy winds and sleet on the venues where Al Gore is speaking about global warming. The instances are too numerous to list. My page got deleted within a few months by the usual suspects. But it was reborn when another wiki user put up a much more detailed and better referenced version, and I thought it unassailable. But no, the usual suspects are at it again:

Maybe big Al has been armtwisting Jimmy Wales with the promise of a big donation on condition it goes. Who knows.

Academic economist Richard Tol has been on the receiving end of some nasty misrepresentation published by notoriously alarmist UK small circulation newspaper ‘The Guardian’. One of it’s ‘columnists’, Dana Nuccitelli, an employee of a big oil and gas outfit called Tetra-Tech, has been writing inaccurate and scurrilous pieces on Tol since he decided to check the quality and accuracy of a paper Dana co-authored with cartoonist John Cook.

Cook runs a parody website called ‘Skeptical science’ which sends up the climate debate with a collection of joke impressions of climate-sceptical talking points and ‘mainstream climate science responses’ to them. Somehow, the Guardian, a self important and supposedly highbrow newspaper, mistook Dana for a real commentator on science and gave him a job as a blogger. Richard writes:

The Guardian has published six hatchet jobs impugning me and my work. The first four are under investigation by the Press Complaints Commission.

For hatchet job #5 and #6, the Guardian granted me the right to reply by return email. They were published together, without a clear structure and in the wrong order, with the first piece heavily edited. Here are the originals.

Taxing issue for king coal
Drax has fallen victim to the Government’s efforts to clean up the way we generate energy in this country. The majority of electricity in the UK still comes from our fleet of coal-fired power stations, of which Drax is one of the biggest in Europe. However, that is all set to change as the Government steadily increases the amount of tax it charges from this year on power generated by burning coal. The Government is trying to shift to cleaner and more modern gas-fired power stations. In order to survive, Drax has drawn up plans to convert its coal-fired generators to run on vast amounts of wood chip, or biomass.

Professor Joseph Reser of the Australian Psychological Association fears that “climate deniers” are hobbling the push to save our poor, sweating planet. He would be better advised to check his “facts”, because many aren’t merely wrong, they are ludicrously so

The eminence grise of the 21,000-member Australian Psychology Society (APS) is Professor Joseph Reser of Griffith University, a contributing author to the 5th IPCC report. With funding support from the since-axed Department of Climate Change, he and his team ran two large-scale Australian surveys in 2010 and 2011 (3096 and 4347 respondents), to document people’s climate change views. From the results he has filed two academic reports totaling 340 pages, endlessly quoted by the APS.

Reser found that“genuine distress at the implications of climate change appeared to be a reality for possibly 20% of survey respondents” (p141). Amazingly, 52% of the total 7443 respondents thought that global warming impacts were “currently” being felt in Australia, 45% thought they had personally witnessed the environmental impacts, and 59% thought their home turf was vulnerable to climate change horrors.

H/T to Barry Woods. The Frontiers in Psychology journal editors have issued this statement regarding the retraction of Stephan Lewandowsky’s deeply unpleasant attack on climate sceptics. They confirm that contrary to the claims of the usual suspects, no ‘threats’ were involved in the retraction decision. Why did Bristol University give Lewandowsky a tenured professorship. Why did the royal Society give him an award? Something stinks.

(Lausanne, Switzerland) – There has been a series of media reports concerning the recent retraction of the paper Recursive Fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation, originally published on 18 March 2013 in Frontiers in Psychology. Until now, our policy has been to handle this matter with discretion out of consideration for all those concerned. But given the extent of the media coverage – largely based on misunderstanding – Frontiers would now like to better clarify the context behind the retraction.(more…)

Round two of the Farage vs Clegg EU in or out debate was high on rhetoric and entertainment from Nick Clegg. Farage did call Nick a liar at one point, but mostly kept his cool while Clegg became increasingly shrill, mentioning the EU as vital in our fight against climate change. He even channelled Stephan Lewandowsky, calling Farage a fantasist who doesn’t believe the Moon landings happened.

“He’s one of those people who see conspiracy theories everywhere!” cried Mr Clegg, gesturing impatiently at the Ukip leader. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he tells us next that there wasn’t a Moon landing, Obama isn’t American, and Elvis isn’t dead!”

Mr Farage, furthermore, lived in “a fantasy world”, yearned to “turn the clock back to a bygone age” when “women knew their place”, and promoted views about the EU that were “a dangerous fantasy” and “a dangerous con”.